Home Pizza making 101

Home Pizza making 101

https://www.yahoo.com/food/pizza-mistakes-you-dont-want-to-make-95117036576.htmlI don't usually make my own pie...too many great pizzerias around here, better than I could ever hope to be...and I don't have a wood burning oven....Yet homemade can be delicious. Here's an article on things NOT to do. I know we have several roadfooders who make their own; I've seen their gorgeous photos and have drooled. Anything in this article they don't agree with??? Curious.

The article was OK but for an experienced pizza maker a pizza really is all about the crust in preparation and baking. The advice is geared to amateurs and occasional bakers. She doesn't even go into dough prep and she hints at the right things but accepts mediocrity when it comes to the crust. Only when you bake a lot of pizzas and start seeing and understanding the subtle differences do you start to understand. A hot stone and high heat is what creates the oven spring. It gets frustrating looking for high heat in the home. Home kitchen ovens don't do it. In the past couple of years some alternatives to wood-fired ovens have come forward. A couple of them, 2Stone and Blackstone (you can Google them) are propane outdoor oven alternatives that will allow you to make a Neapolitan style pizza almost equivalent to a masonry wood-fired oven. You can get better heat than a home oven from another even less expensive oven called the Pizza Que or Pizzeria Pronto.

For the record, I make my dough and sauce from scratch and use only fresh ingredients. Never use shredded cheese.

One more thing. If you get serious about making your own pizza you will start to find frozen pizza adulterated with so many things to taste extremely artificial. You will also be able to differentiate a good pizza from a bad pizza at a pizzeria. There are way more bad pizzas than good.

Everybody stand up and pay attention to what davydd says about making pizza. I have seen the pictures of his creations and I (who am not a big pizza fan) want to eat his pizza right now. The man knows how to make pizza.

Funny, I read that yesterday... the author is (was?) a local food writer for the paper/website here.

I worked in my brother's restaurant making pizza for 4 months this past fall/winter, so now I'm even more of a pizza snob than I ever was before. There is definitely an art that goes into making the dough just right. I rarely make it a home now though, I'll grab a ball of dough from somewhere local, or use these small pocket-less pita rounds that I really enjoy. Other than that, we have a plethora of good pizza places around here with decent prices.

I recently took a course with these guys, and it was fantastic: cured all kinds of bad habits I had gotten into over the years, and yielded pizza that is New Haven-level (well, almost): http://pizzaschool.com/

I have eaten pizza at many places in New York City, and have never had any compared to the ones I have had in CT. My daughter moved to Beacon Falls, CT two years ago and I have had fantastic pizzas in CT at 6 difference places!

home pizza stones really don't work. they break into pieces when i use my system.... i use a 14 inch square steel plate 1/2" thick on the top rack of a typical electric home oven (in this case a roper..) and i preheat the oven to 500 (the maximum) for an hour. then about 10 minutes before i put the pizza in i turn on the broiler. once the pizza is in i turn off the broiler and go back to the 500 oven setting for about 10 minutes, plus or minus a few minutes.... you have to watch pizza when it's baking.

sometimes i get an awesome pizza, sometimes i miscalculate and get a soggy or burnt pie... but even bad homemade pizza is better than any fast-food pizza.

Home pizza stones work great for me. Two things you must know. First, the stone stays in the oven - always. You pre-heat the stone and deliver the pizza to the stone with a peel and remove the pizza the same way. Some people think a pizza should be prepared on a stone and placed in an oven and taken out. That will create temperature shock and that also defeats the idea of using a stone. A pre-heated stone is what creates oven spring beautifully puffy corniciones and even bakes top and bottom.

The second thing is never clean a stone with water or soap. Don't oil a stone. Pizza dough will not stick to a pre-heated stone. Scrape off any spillage after baking. If it gets just too ugly for your eyes leave a stone in the oven during an oven cleaning cycle. Oven cleaning does a good job of cleaning a stone as well. Otherwise, heating a stone at 500 degrees or higher is going to sanitize it. In handling stones correctly I have never had one crack.

There are lot of steel plate advocates. They pretty much do the same thing as a stone.

every stone i've tried has broken up, and i've never washed it, always preheated it in a cold oven, allowed it to cool completely in the oven etc etc and they always crack after 5-10 heating-cooling cycles. stored horizontally on a shelf in a dry pantry. maybe none of you have ever tried using yours on the top rack.

I've been using my stone with an oven of 500 - I put stone in, heat up to 500. Start making my dough, yeast in water, flour, the whole thing. Make a ball - let it rest. Pound it out. Shape it, add ingredients. By the time I'm done with all that- the stone is nearly smoking, and it cooks in just a few minutes. Pizza cooks from stone up, plus top down. I get a NY crusty bottom, chewy top. Perfection. Nothing ever sticks. I do used some corn meal on the peel, so that the pizza slides easier onto the stone. and sizzle! I got some peetza pie!

I've decided to try another Chicago style deep dish. The dough is always my downfall. I think I may have found some more secrets to that buttery pie like crust...we'll see in a few hours. I'm doing a traditional sausage, with the mozz laid out on the dough in slices, raw Italian sausage (made by a friend's father who recently closed his family shop Squadritto's in Syracuse after decades of service to the community). Then I top with hand crushed San Marzanno tomatoes, a little oregano and grated cheese.

Biggest problem now is I can't find my deep dish plan after our move this summer...Hmmm...